Justin12, I'm just repeating this infor from what the experts have said in previous threads, as I am new enough at this to mostly just repeat what I have read.
According to several on this forum, it takes approximately 10 pounds of forage fish to put on a pound of predator. While your misquito fish may be thick, in a quarter acre pond they probably don't weigh in aggregate 10 pounds. You do the math.
(of course BG do eat lots of other things besides fish to gain their weight).
Can you have a natural quarter acre pond without supplemnental feed? Absolutely. I know of many around me about that size that have never seen a bit of artificial feed. But at a quarter acre, you are not going to get big pounds of fish production.
I don't know if this is an accurate analogy, but I would compare the production of a quarter acre "natural" pond to be on par with an unfertilized garden the size of a large dinner table. If you want it to produce more, you have to add the resources to do so. Either way is ok, just depends on how many pounds of fish you want to support. And if you try to do it by buying forage fish (minnows, etc), ten pounds for every additional pound of BG is going to get costly.
I built a forage pond specifically to raise FHM to supplement the fish in my larger pond. I think it will help and it will work, but it definitely was not economical (just part of the cost of my hobby). Feed is cheap compared to raising or buying fish for feed.
People may want their pond to be "all natural", when in reality building a pond is completely unnatural. If nature wanted a pond there, she would have put one there. We can only manage it to the degree that satisfies our own perception of what "natural" is.
Last edited by snrub; 07/29/14 06:18 PM.
